virt July 2009

virt@lists.fedoraproject.org

39 participants
66 discussions

ANNOUNCE: Rawhide virt repo for F11 users
by Mark McLoughlin 30 Oct '09

30 Oct '09

Hey, The idea[1] was discussed here before, so I'll keep this short. We've set up a repository for people running Fedora 11 who would like to test the rawhide/F12 virt packages. To use it, do e.g. $> cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-virt-preview.repo << EOF [rawvirt] name=Virtualization Rawhide for Fedora 11 baseurl=http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview/f11/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgcheck=0 EOF $> yum update At the moment, it contains the F-12 versions of libvirt and qemu, but as F-12 development continues, it will contain more. I'll send periodic mails to the list detailing the latest updates. Also, this is very much a work-in-progress. The TODO list includes: - get createrepo installed on fedorapeople.org - include debuginfo packages in the repo (need more quota) - find a better location than markmc.fedorapeople.org - enable package builders to upload directly to the repo - automatically do preview build/upload for devel/ builds - allow building against preview packages; e.g. for language bindings Comments most welcome. Help with the TODO list is even more welcome :-) Thanks, Mark. [1] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-April/msg00154.html

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Dom0 kernels
by M A Young 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

I have built a new set of kernel packages based on fedora rawhide kernels and the xen/dom0/hackery branch of Jeremy's git repository ( http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/jeremy/xen.git;a=summary ). This batch (kernel-2.6.29-0.114.2.6.rc6.fc11) is available via the koji build system at http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1149500 These are really for development and debugging purposes only, as I am still having problems getting them to boot, but others have reported more success at getting kernels based on this git repository working, so you might be lucky. Note to install these packages on Fedora 10 you will need to have rpm-4.6.0-1.fc10 installed (currently in updates-testing but it should be available in updates soon) because of the change to SHA-256 file digest hashing in recent Fedora 11 builds. Michael Young

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Supermin question
by Thomas S Hatch 04 Aug '09

04 Aug '09

I imagine I am missing something obvious, but I can't figure out how to start a supermin appliance. I ran the helper script and generated my initrd and symbolic link to my kernel, but I can't figure out how to use it beyond that, how to actually boot it. Thanks! -Tom Hatch

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ANNOUNCE: New release virt-manager 0.8.0
by Cole Robinson 29 Jul '09

29 Jul '09

I'm happy to announce a new virt-manager release, version 0.8.0. The release can be downloaded from: http://virt-manager.org/download.html The direct download link is: http://virt-manager.org/download/sources/virt-manager/virt-manager-0.8.0.ta… This release includes: - New 'Clone VM' Wizard - Improved UI, including an overhaul of the main 'manager' view - System tray icon for easy VM access (start, stop, view console/details) - Wizard for adding serial, parallel, and video devices to existing VMs. - CPU pinning support (Michal Novotny) - Ability to view and change VM security (sVirt) settings (Dan Walsh) - Many bug fixes and improvements Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback! Thanks, Cole

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Can't use network in guests
by Gianluca Sforna 29 Jul '09

29 Jul '09

Hi all, it seems that after I installed Fedora 11 I can't assign to guests any ethernet device; in particular, the virt-manager VM creation wizard do not let me choose any network device, and if I try to assign it later via the "Add new hardware" button I get a traceback: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/addhardware.py", line 288, in forward if(self.validate(notebook.get_current_page()) != True): File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/addhardware.py", line 882, in validate net = self.get_config_network() File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/addhardware.py", line 407, in get_config_network return ["network", model.get_value(net.get_active_iter(), 0)] TypeError: iter must be a GtkTreeIter any idea? -- Gianluca Sforna http://morefedora.blogspot.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/gianlucasforna

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ANNOUNCE: New release virtinst 0.500.0
by Cole Robinson 29 Jul '09

29 Jul '09

I'm happy to announce a new virtinst release, version 0.500.0. The release can be downloaded from: http://virt-manager.org/download.html The direct download link is: http://virt-manager.org/download/sources/virtinst/virtinst-0.500.0.tar.gz This release includes: - New virt-install device options --serial, --parallel, and --video - Allow various auth types for libvirt connections (PolicyKit, SASL, ...) - New virt-clone option --auto-clone: generates all needed input. - Option to specify network device model via virt-install --network (Guido Gunther) - New virt-install option --virt-type for specifying hypervisor type (kvm, qemu). --accelerate is now the default behavior: To provision a plain qemu VM on a KVM enabled host, use '--virt-type qemu' - OVF input support for virt-convert - Many bug fixes and improvements Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback! Thanks, Cole

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git tree for Fedora qemu patches
by Mark McLoughlin 28 Jul '09

28 Jul '09

Hey, Glauber and I are going to start using git to manage the patches for the qemu package. The idea is that we'll use git's magical powers to make it easier for us to fix problems in patches, cherry-pick patches from upstream, re-base our patches to a newer upstream, etc. Nothing is changing, really - patches should still go upstream first and we'll still include patches as individual files in the source RPM - this is purely about making managing those patches easier. Here's the tree: http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=qemu-fedora.git It might be useful to others who want to help with back-porting fixes etc. Cheers, Mark.

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Success with Fedora 10 Xen pv_ops 2.6.29-rc8 dom0
by Pasi Kärkkäinen 27 Jul '09

27 Jul '09

Hello! I've used a lot of time trying to get my custom Xen pv_ops dom0 kernel working with virt-install and/or virt-manager on Fedora 10, and now it seems I got things working. If you want to play with this you need: 1) New enough pv_ops dom0 kernel (2.6.29-rc8 or newer) so it has /sys/hypervisor support included - Compile with CONFIG_HIGHPTE=n since it seems to be broken still 2) libvirt 0.6.1 and related packages from Fedora 10 updates-testing In addition to those I'm using Xen 3.3.1-9 packages from rawhide/F11 rebuilt for F10. With the older Fedora 10 libvirt packages libvirtd was crashing often for me, and I had some other issues with virt-install console window not opening but stalling etc.. Today I was able to run the following on Fedora 10 32bit PAE pv_ops dom0: - CentOS 5.3 32bit PAE PV domU - Fedora 10 32bit PAE PV domU - Use virt-install to install Fedora 10 32bit PAE PV domU (using custom kickstart to force PAE kernel installation to avoid the anaconda BUG which installs wrong non-PAE kernel as a default). Fedora 11 (rawhide) installation most probably works too. I'm using LVM volumes for domU disks (tap:aio is not yet supported by pv_ops dom0 kernel). Network seems to work after running "ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0" on the guest.. dunno why that's needed. That's something to figure out later:) Graphical domU console works with virt-viewer and virt-install during installation. Issues: - virt-manager complains about default network (virbr0) being inactive and asks if I want to start it. If I click Yes, then I get error: "libvirtError: cannot create bridge 'virbr0': File exists" virbr0 works just fine with virt-install. So dunno what's the problem with that.. have to look into that later. Thanks to everyone involved for helping me with this! -- Pasi

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I/O load distribution
by Dennis Jacobfeuerborn 27 Jul '09

27 Jul '09

Hi, What is the best way to deal with I/O load when running several VMs on a physical machine with local or remote storage? What I'm primarily worried about is the case when several VMs cause disk I/O at the same time. One example would be the "updatedb" cronjob of the mlocate package. If you have say 5 VMs running on a physical System with a local software raid-1 as storage and the all run updatedb at the same time that causes all of them to run really slowly because the starve each other fighting over the disk. What is the best way to soften the impact of such a situation? Does it make sense to use a hardware raid instead? How would the raid type affect the performance in this case? Would the fact that the I/O load gets distributed across multiple spindles in, say, a 4 disk hardware raid-5 have a big impact on this? I'm currently facing the problem where I fear that random disk I/O by too many VMs on a physical system could cripple their performance even though I have plenty of CPU cores/RAM left to run them. Has anyone experience with this problem and maybe some data to shed some light on this potential bottleneck for virtualization? Regards, Dennis

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swap space on virtual machines
by Rich Mahn 27 Jul '09

27 Jul '09

How big should the swap parititons be on virtual machines under qemu, qemu/kvm? It seems to me that if the VM actually needs swap space, it would be more efficient to allocate more virual memory to it. I know it's possible to allocate more virtual memory than there is physical memory. Intuitively (which isn't always right) it would seem that allocating more memory is more efficient than letting the VM use swap space. It would seem that the host machine would have to either use physical memory or swap space if it's required. Compared to the VM using a swap space that is a virtual disk space that goes to real disk. Thoughts anyone?? rich

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virt July 2009